Putin and Xi and Culture

The essential but false conceit of Marxism is housed in the assumption that economic systems shape culture. In fact it is the other way around; the power of culture enables societies to outlast economic experimentation, even when conducted on an ambitious scale. To observe the stickiness of cultural continuity we need look no further than modern Russia and China, where Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are best engaged not as enforcers of discredited communist ideologies, but instead as czar and emperor caught up in ancient concerns of global status, regional competition, and the preservation of hegemonic mechanisms of power and control.